[kictanet] Making Sense of our development

[Kivuva]

Dr. Ndemo,
Hyacinth has become a multibillion dollar industry like Kibera and
Mathate slums. Anybody who tries to eradicate it shall be lynched.

On 11/10/2012, bitange at jambo.co.ke <bitange at jambo.co.ke> wrote:
> Listers,
> I very much know that my post today is not directly ICT but its
> implications have a great bearing on the decisions we make about our
> future development in ICT.
>
> Page 19 of the Star of Thursday, October 11th, carried a story on Water
> Hyacinth titled “Water hyacinth project threatened by court order”.  This
> is apparently a donor funded project in its phase two under Lake Victoria
> Environmental Management Project (LVEMP).
>
> LVEMP  II is an eight-year US$254 million (Ksh. 2.1 billion) old regional
> project being implemented in the five East African Community partner
> states says the article.  Objectives of the project include:  improving
> “collaborative management of trans-boundary natural resources of Lake
> Victoria basin” as well as “reduce environmental stress in the targeted
> pollution hotspots and selected degraded sub-catchment areas as a way of
> improving the livelihoods of communities who depend on the lake basin’s
> resources”.
>
> One will hope that the project is supposed to physically remove water
> hyacinth from the lake to enable the people access the resources from the
> lake.  However, in the past eight years the spread of this water menace
> has more than tripled and this is what prompted me we to re-examine the
> objectives as stated. If these objectives were to be re-stated in
> simplified English, the real meaning could be to help citizens of East
> Africa understand how to collaborate and manage their resources as well as
> reduce their stress.  The project therefore has nothing to do with water
> hyacinth and hence the reason why the people are fighting over it.
>
> If the donor language were to be simpler, they would have thought about
> project sustainability in which case we did not need all the resources
> that is at the disposal of the fighting citizens.  In my view we needed
> only US$50 (US$10 million for each country) to set up an organic
> fertilizer factory.  Hyacinth has been found to be a good ingredient for
> organic fertilizer.  Just recently I wrote a blog how soil nutrients have
> been depleted in densely populated districts with excessive land
> sub-divisions.  Studies also show productivity levels dropping
> significantly that our food security and safety is at its worst threat.
>
> Further, chemical fertilizer may be poisoning our ground water and may be
> likely the cause of increased cancer cases in the region.  There is
> greater urgency than ever before that we exploit every opportunity for
> developing organic fertilizer like hyacinth that would improve on
> productivity, ensure sustainable development and reduce its impact on our
> water resources.  Our problems would only be solved by us and as such
> foreign interventions will not always be a universal remedy to our
> predicament.
>
> Ndemo.
>
>
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